Part 2 (1/2)

Throughout 1913 and well into 1914, the two groups of Western workers who improbably found themselves in this same remote corner of northern Syria had an alternately amicable and contentious relations.h.i.+p. The German railwaymen in Jerablus a.s.sisted the British archaeologists by hauling away the discarded stone from their excavations for use in their railroad embankments. In turn, the Germans frequently sought out the Britons-and, with his fluent Arabic, especially Lawrence-to mediate in their perpetually tense relations with local workers. A chief source of that tension was the difficulty the Germans had in finding good help, their best workers routinely jumping s.h.i.+p for the higher wages and more respectful supervision of Lawrence and Woolley.

Very soon, these two groups would be on opposite sides of a world war, and a different railroad-the Hejaz line, running from Damascus seven hundred miles south to the city of Medina-would become the most vital transportation link in the Middle Eastern theater of that conflict. The knowledge Lawrence gained from watching the railway construction in Jerablus was undoubtedly of great a.s.sistance to him when, in a few years' time, he would make blowing up the Hejaz Railway a personal pastime.

AT MIDMORNING ON September 15, 1913, twenty-six-year-old William Yale was part of a three-man crew ”pulling rods”-detaching and stacking drill sections, just about the most miserable job to be had in an oilfield-in the Kiefer field of northern Oklahoma when a courier on horseback approached. Minutes later, the Kiefer straw boss called Yale over to hand him a telegram. It was from the corporate headquarters of the Standard Oil Company of New York, and it was succinct: ”Report to New York immediately.”

After graduating from his eponymous university in 1910, Yale had struggled to find his calling until, in 1912, he came across a notice soliciting applicants for the ”foreign service school” of the Standard Oil Company of New York. On a whim, he applied.

Operating out of Standard's corporate headquarters at 26 Broadway in New York, the ”school” consisted of a four-month intensive lecture and seminar program, designed to educate its applicants in all aspects of the petroleum industry, as well as to instill in them the ”Standard man” ideal. Just what that ideal might consist of was difficult to say, for by 1912 Standard Oil was the most infamous corporation in the history of international commerce, its name synonymous with capitalist greed run amok.

Through cutthroat tactics devised by its princ.i.p.al shareholder, John D. Rockefeller, Standard had so thoroughly dominated the U.S. petroleum industry over the previous four decades that by the early 1900s it controlled nearly 90 percent of the nation's oil production. For nearly as long, it had operated a complex web of front companies and sh.e.l.l corporations that had defeated the efforts of every ”trust buster” lawman trying to break its stranglehold. Finally, in 1911, just the year before Yale's job application, the U.S. Supreme Court declared Standard to be an illegal monopoly and decreed it be broken up into thirty-four separate companies.

Whether this divest.i.ture truly ended the Standard monopoly is still the subject of debate, but it did have the effect of forcing its component parts to specialize, either to focus on supplying regional domestic markets or on building international exports. Among the most aggressive in this latter sphere was the new Standard Oil Company of New York-often referred to by its acronym, Socony-the second largest of the thirty-four ”baby Standards.”

While other baby Standards turned inward, Socony looked at the great world beyond and saw a plethora of burgeoning markets thirsting for petroleum. It was to coordinate and standardize its marketing approaches in these far-flung spots that the company had launched its foreign service school. William Yale, an enthusiastic pupil, would call the program's teaching methods ”far more effective and efficient” than anything he'd encountered at either prep school or university.

And the Socony administrators clearly liked what they saw in William Yale. At the conclusion of his coursework, he was selected to stay on and dispatched to take a firsthand look at oil production in the United States in preparation for future work abroad. Through the autumn of 1912, Yale shuttled to a variety of Standard oilfields in the Midwest, tasked only to write up weekly reports on what he observed and send them back to Socony headquarters.

But the endless tour of oilfields had soon become monotonous to the restless Yale. In early 1913, he wrote to his New York supervisors asking to be given a field job, arguing that if he was to learn any more about the oil business it would have to be by doing rather than observing. That letter undoubtedly further endeared him to 26 Broadway; the notion that a college man-an Ivy League graduate, no less-would request to toil as a laborer indicated just the sort of employee Standard was looking for. Yale was soon sent to the new Cus.h.i.+ng field in western Oklahoma to work as a roustabout.

For a time, he reveled in the hard labor. Living in the middle of nowhere for weeks on end, Yale worked a succession of Oklahoma fields, where he cleared drill sites, laid piping, hauled machinery, and constructed derricks. He had been doing this for several months when the cable arrived from New York.

Just three days removed from the Kiefer field, Yale walked into the lobby of the Socony corporate headquarters at 26 Broadway in lower Manhattan. There, he was taken up to the thirteenth-floor office suite of Standard's vice president, William Bemis. Yale found two other men already waiting in the suite, hats in hand, and all three maintained a respectful silence as the officious Bemis fired off directives to his scurrying staff.

”My mind was in a dream world,” Yale recounted, ”as I listened to him dictating instructions to his secretary about s.h.i.+pments of kerosene oil to Shanghai, about contracts for asphalt to pave the streets of a city in India, and contracts with the Greek government for fuel oil to supply the Greek navy at Piraeus.”

When finally Bemis turned his attention to the three waiting men, it was to inform them that they had been selected for a special overseas a.s.signment, that in just two days' time they would board SS Imperator in New York harbor for its voyage to Calais, France. From there, they would travel overland across the length of Europe to Constantinople, where they would receive further instructions from the manager of Standard's branch office. Before dismissing them, Bemis stressed to the three men that they were embarking on a highly confidential mission. As such, they were to tell no one of their ultimate destination or of their affiliation with Standard Oil. Instead, they were to pa.s.s themselves off as wealthy ”playboys” en route to a Grand Tour of the Holy Land, a charade lent credence by their deluxe travel accommodations: the Imperator was the newest and most luxurious pa.s.senger s.h.i.+p plying the Atlantic crossing, their rail pa.s.sage to Constantinople was to be aboard the fabled Orient Express, and they would be traveling first-cla.s.s the entire way.

But upholding the playboy ruse was easier said than done for Yale's two companions. J. C. Hill, the leader of the team, was a rough-around-the-edges crew boss from the steel mills of Pennsylvania. Rudolf McGovern was a dour and socially awkward geologist in his late twenties. Even if these two could manage to put on airs suggesting that they came from money-and that seemed doubtful-they hardly seemed prime candidates for a pilgrimage to biblical sites. Perhaps wisely, their answer to the playboy directive was to interact with the s.h.i.+p's other first-cla.s.s pa.s.sengers as little as possible.

William Yale had no such difficulties. To the contrary, the voyage was like a disorienting return to his former life. Among the Imperator's first-cla.s.s pa.s.sengers were a great many young people, the offspring of America's industrial magnates and landed aristocracy, setting off on their requisite Grand Tour of Europe, the sort of tame adventure that until a few years earlier would have been his lot.

Yale would recall one peculiar detail of that journey. The Imperator (German for emperor) was the new flags.h.i.+p of the Hamburg-America Line, and at every dinnertime its German officers rose to offer a toast to ”der Tag” (the day). Unschooled in the nuances of German, Yale a.s.sumed that the gesture was in quaint celebration of the day just lived; it would be some time before he understood it was actually a kind of code, a toast in giddy antic.i.p.ation of the coming world war, then less than a year away.

ON SEPTEMBER 15, 1913, the same day that William Yale received his cable at the Kiefer oilfield ordering him to New York, T. E. Lawrence was at the train station in Aleppo, sixty miles to the west of Carchemish, awaiting the arrival of his brother Will.

Of his four brothers, Lawrence had always been closest to Will, the middle child and just two years his junior. Upon learning that his brother was leaving England to take up a teaching position in India, he had implored Will to stop off in Syria en route.

Despite their closeness, the visit must have been the source of some anxiety for Lawrence, who had long since been consigned to the role of family bohemian; it was easy to imagine that his brother might be quite shocked by the primitiveness of his surroundings and to report back as much to Oxford. Lawrence needn't have worried. After the two spent some ten days together at Jerablus, Lawrence saw Will off at the local train station for the return to Aleppo, a moment Will recounted in a letter to their parents: ”You must not think of Ned as leading an uncivilized existence. When I saw him last as the train left the station, he was wearing white flannels, socks and red slippers, with a white Magdalen blazer, and was talking to the governor of Biredjik in lordly fas.h.i.+on.”

That parting at Jerablus was to be the last time the brothers would ever see each other.

Chapter 3.

Another and Another Nice Thing Always my soul hungered for less than it had.

T. E. LAWRENCE, SEVEN PILLARS OF WISDOM.

How do you put a collar on a leopard? Very carefully, according to the old joke, but in the autumn of 1913, T. E. Lawrence and Leonard Woolley were in need of a practical answer to that question. They had recently been given a young leopard as a gift by a government official in Aleppo, and had found that so long as he remained chained in the courtyard of the Jerablus compound, he made for a very effective watchdog. The problem, though, was that leopards grow very quickly, and it was now just a matter of time before he tore through the flimsy collar he had been delivered in.

The archaeologists' first idea was to throw a large slatted box over the cat, then reach through the slats to effect the collar exchange, but since the leopard was ”not very sweet tempered” to begin with, according to Lawrence, this confinement only put him in a fouler mood. Their solution was a rather clever one. Slightly enlarging an opening in the box, they kept stuffing in burlap sacks until eventually the leopard was wedged so tightly that he couldn't move.

”Then we took the top off the box, collared him, and let him loose again,” Lawrence wrote to his family. ”He will make a most splendid carpet some day.”

Along with learning how to recollar a leopard, it was in that autumn 1913 digging season at Carchemish, Lawrence's fifth, that he and Woolley would make a spectacular find-the site's main temple. It was an archaeologist's dream, the discovery of a lifetime, and it helped fuel in Lawrence a sense that he had found his true calling, and perhaps his true home. The s.p.a.cious main living room of the Jerablus compound was now a cozy s.p.a.ce adorned with artwork on the walls and carpets and animal hides on the floor, a library with books in seven languages, and an enormous fireplace constantly stoked with hot-burning olivewood. He revealed his feelings in a letter to a close friend from his Oxford days that autumn.

”I have got to like this place very much,” he wrote, ”and the people here-five or six of them-and the whole manner of living pleases me.... Carchemish will not be finished for another four or five years and I'm afraid that, after that, I'll probably go after another and another nice thing.”

But heartbreakingly, funding from the British Museum-always extremely tight and always conditionally doled out from one season or year to the next-had been effectively exhausted. Unless an unforeseen new funding source suddenly appeared, the next digging season, spring 1914, was slated to be the last. This knowledge hung over Lawrence and Woolley, and it overshadowed their excitement over that season's discoveries with a deepening sense of despair. It was only when they began closing down the site in preparation for their off-season break that a new possibility presented itself.

Under the auspices of the Palestine Exploration Fund, a British Museum director explained, a group of Royal Engineers was about to embark on an archaeological survey of the so-called Wilderness of Zin of southernmost Palestine; might Lawrence and Woolley be interested in joining them during their upcoming break?

For Lawrence and Woolley, it presented a choice between spending two months of leisure in England, or trekking through one of the world's most inhospitable corners. But the lure of exploration really made this no choice at all; both men immediately signed on.

LATE ONE NIGHT in early October 1913, William Yale lay in his tent in the mountains of Anatolia, struck by a sense of wonder at how quickly a life could change. Just three weeks earlier he had been living in a two-room shanty and pulling rods in an Oklahoma oilfield, and now he was traveling through one of the most ruggedly beautiful landscapes on earth, a land only a handful of Americans had ever seen.

Adding to his sense of awe was that in all the time he'd spent in Oklahoma daydreaming about where Standard Oil might send him, he had scarcely considered the Near East. Instead, on that day he walked into the Socony headquarters in New York, he had a.s.sumed he was being dispatched as a sales representative to China.

Yale's misconception was understandable. In 1913, Socony was primarily an exporter of petroleum products, and China was by far its largest market. In comparison, the company's exports to the Ottoman Empire, primarily kerosene to fuel its embryonic industrial facilities, were minuscule. To put into perspective how minuscule, while Standard's kerosene represented the second biggest American export to the Ottoman Empire, the largest was Singer sewing machines.

But as the Standard vice president, William Bemis, had explained to the three men brought to his office that morning, they weren't being sent to the Near East to rustle up new purchasing clients, but rather to find and develop new sources of oil.

It was simple economics. By the end of 1913, the exponentially growing demand for oil and petroleum products around the globe meant that demand would soon outstrip supply. In the United States alone, the number of combustion-engine vehicles on the road had increased twentyfold in less than a decade, from some seventy-five thousand in 1905 to well over 1.5 million in 1913-and already a number of the oldest American oilfields were starting to run dry.

Oil was rapidly becoming a crucial military a.s.set as well. In 1912, just a year before Yale's summoning to New York, the first lord of the admiralty of Great Britain, Winston Churchill, had made international headlines with his plan to convert the entire Royal Navy from coal to oil. As might be expected, this proposed modernization of the world's most powerful fleet was already causing the navies of other nations, including Germany, to scramble to follow suit.

As a consequence, both American and European oil companies were now rus.h.i.+ng to find and exploit new fields wherever they might exist. One especially promising region was the Near East. In the 1870s, huge oil and gas deposits had been discovered around Baku on the Caspian Sea, and this had been followed by another large strike in the Persian Gulf in 1908. Those fields were quickly dominated by European consortiums, and the race was on to tap and lay claim to the next big find.

To that end, the Socony branch office in Constantinople had quietly obtained a six-month option from a consortium of three Jerusalem-based businessmen who held vast exploration concessionary rights in three different regions of the Ottoman Empire. It was to perform preliminary fieldwork in these concessionary zones that Yale, McGovern, and Hill had been dispatched from New York. As for the elaborate secrecy surrounding their mission, there were two reasons: to throw any potential compet.i.tors off the scent, naturally, but also to keep the Standard name in the background for as long as possible. Its recent breakup notwithstanding, the Standard brand was still regarded with such abiding distrust in the Near East, as in many other parts of the world, that the easiest way to besmirch the reputation of a business rival was to accuse it of being a Standard Oil front.

But despite its stealth approach, there were indications that Standard Oil of New York was not quite the smoothly run, rapacious machine its progenitor had been. Indeed, one such indication was the composition of the team it had sent to explore the Ottoman concessions. J. C. Hill, the chief, was a Pittsburgh steel man with no experience in the oil industry. Rudolf McGovern was a college-trained geologist, but had never actually set foot in an oilfield. And while William Yale certainly knew his way around an oilfield, he had absolutely no knowledge of geology.

Certainly J. C. Hill had an unusual approach to exploration, one that might best be described as fatalistic. Arriving in Constantinople in early October, the team had set out for the first concessionary zone, a broad stretch of mountainous terrain in central Anatolia, just south of the Black Sea. Accompanied by a small team of local guides, the three Americans spent a couple of weeks roaming the high plateau on horseback, but each time McGovern pointed to a distant spot he deemed worthy of closer inspection, Hill thought better of it. A critical moment came when the group learned there was a boat heading back to Constantinople in thirty hours' time, and that there wouldn't be another for at least two weeks; they made the boat with just minutes to spare.

Their pace slowed considerably once they reached the second exploration zone, the Dead Sea valley in Palestine, in November 1913. Essentially a continuation of the Great Rift Valley of East Africa, from a geological standpoint the region held a good deal more promise than Anatolia. For several weeks, the team traveled the western sh.o.r.e of the Dead Sea, picking their way through shale screes and the surrounding limestone cliffs. Time and again, they found tantalizing clues to the presence of oil-lumps of pure asphalt floating in the sea, surface limestone so impregnated with petroleum that it gave off the odor of gasoline-but nothing to confirm that a commercially viable reservoir might lie beneath.

Then again, it was hard to say much with any definitiveness since Hill, employing the exploratory style he had honed in Anatolia, soon began to veto nearly every spot that McGovern recommended for closer investigation. At times it seemed to Yale that they weren't so much looking for oil as trying to hide from it.

Matters finally came to a head in early January when Hill announced that their work there was done and ordered the breaking of camp for the return journey to Jerusalem. Yale, fueled by three months of frustration, could hold his tongue no longer. He confronted Hill, and the two ended up in a heated argument.

Whether that argument had some effect or it was mere coincidence, on the very next day, as the group climbed into the Judean foothills for the return to Jerusalem, Hill suddenly drew up his horse to gaze at a mountainous outcrop some thirty miles to the south. It was a strange geological formation, an irregular ma.s.sif rising from the surrounding desert plain. Examined through binoculars, there appeared to be pools of something collected at the mountain base, something s.h.i.+mmering and iridescent.

”There.” J. C. Hill pointed off to the mountains of Kornub. ”That is where we will find oil.”

Events moved very quickly after that. Hurrying his bedraggled caravan back to Jerusalem, Hill immediately cabled Socony headquarters with news of his ”find.” By return telegram, he was ordered to gather up the two primary concession holders of the Palestine tracts, Jerusalem businessmen Ismail Hakki Bey and Suleiman Na.s.sif, and personally deliver them to the Socony office in Cairo as soon as possible. In Hill's absence, Yale and Rudolf McGovern were to go on to Kornub and conduct tests to determine just how immense this new strike might be.